Tuesday, March 21, 2017

#Wikidata and #activism

When you care about something, you want to make sure that when you do something, it has an impact. There are many ways a difference can be made, you can protest, you can write in a blog, you can write Wikipedia articles and you can try to connect things in Wikidata.

For Wikimedians like me, sharing the sum of all knowledge, is why we are involved. As knowledge is key, it is important to make sure that facts are registered and access to knowledge becomes enabled.

The problem is that it is not obvious how and where a difference can be made. When the BBC gives diversity a prominent place because of its 100 women program, it seems obvious that we will write articles about these women. It is however not the first time that the BBC runs this program. We have written articles for women celebrated in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. But in what language are these articles written? How much are they read? How well connected are these women to universities, to political parties to organisations and what countries are they from?

For a Wikimedian these are interesting questions. For an organiser of editathons they are what measures success. Is this activism? Sure. How does it affect the legitimate concern of impartiality? Not really as Wikimedia has always been about what people fancy to work on.
Thanks,
GerardM